by Robyn Sisman
“Just testing.” Lloyd began to search through the zipped pockets of the small airline bag over his shoulder. The car service that had met them at the airport had brought the house keys in a sealed bag. Lloyd knew he had put them in a safe place. But which safe place? He began to empty out the bag onto the low pillar that supported a sagging gate, laying down his wallet and credit cards under Betsy’s steely gaze.
“Try the raincoat,” she suggested.
“You know I never carry things in my pockets.” In fact, it was Betsy who had taught him that this spoiled the line of his clothes, and had broken him of the habit.
But she was right—as usual. Lloyd picked up the suitcases, climbed the short flight of stone steps to the front door and unlocked it. Inside was a small hallway with two farther doors. The left-hand one was theirs. It opened straight on to a steep flight of stairs that led to the upper flat.
“Goodness!” Betsy exclaimed, recoiling from the brilliant color of the stairway.
At the top, off a narrow landing, was a small, cluttered kitchen painted daffodil yellow, with a sycamore tree pressing against the tall window. A couple more steps led up to a corridor with three farther doors. Betsy opened the first one cautiously. The room was dark, the light barred by shutters. All Lloyd could make out was a high brass bed that seemed to allow little room for anything else. His heart sank. He knew Betsy would be wondering where she could hang her clothes.
The bathroom was worse. When Lloyd finally found the piece of string that turned on a noisy extractor fan as well as the light, it was to reveal a minute, windowless cubbyhole.
“I didn’t know they made toilets like that anymore,” Betsy said, in an awed whisper. “Still . . .” She went inside and shut the door. Lloyd could hear her fumbling with a catch that didn’t seem to work.
Exploring further, he found himself in a large living room that ran the full width of the house, with two handsome, arched windows overlooking the street. This was better. Venetian red paint had been slapped exuberantly across the walls; the floors were of old pine, scattered with rugs; at one end was a large marble fireplace with a cast-iron grate sprouting dried artichoke flowers. Most of the furniture was cheap and modern: angular lamps, self-assembly shelves, simple canvas chairs. A spectacular exception was an enormous Empire-style sofa, piled high with cushions to hide its fraying velvet upholstery and resting on bulbous lion’s-paw feet. Clearly this was the nerve-center of the room, positioned within effortless reach of a sleek sound system and a telephone answering-machine that was flashing red. Behind one of the woodwormy legs, Lloyd noticed a forgotten mug encrusted with old tea or coffee. Frowning a little, he bent down and picked it up to take it to the kitchen. First he circled the room, like Sherlock Holmes searching for clues.
On the wall above the mantelpiece a clever pencil drawing showed Fred Astaire in mid-tap dance, coattails flying, while a 1930s busboy tried vainly to call him to the telephone. The caption underneath read: “I’m dancing and I can’t be bothered now.” By the window was a long wooden table set on curving steel legs. Right in the middle of it was an old milk bottle stuffed with two bunches of flowers, still tied with green sticky tape. Lloyd saw that the bottle had been used to secure a small sheet of lined paper, obviously ripped from a Filofax and scrawled in haste. He picked it up.
Welcome! Sorry the place is a bit of a tip, no time to tidy what with short notice. Please feel free to use everything, move stuff about, etc. Good Indian take-away around first corner to the left if you arrive starving. Could you very kindly forward any interesting-looking post, no brown envelopes or beastly bills? Thanx.
P.S. Immersion heater sometimes clonks in night—just hit pipe with hammer.
P.P.S. Hope you don’t mind Mr. Kipling. He is old, but exceedingly friendly.
It was signed with a big S.
Lloyd read the note once, turned it over to check there was nothing more, then read it again, savoring the unfamiliar idioms. He wondered what an immersion heater was, though if it “clonked” he would find out soon enough. Mr. Kipling must be some talkative neighbor, perhaps a companion for Betsy if she got lonely. She was good with old people.
Right on cue, there was a distant, despairing moan from the kitchen. Lloyd found Betsy looking unhappy, arms folded fiercely. “Lloyd, I can’t believe this. There’s no refrigerator.”
“Nonsense.” Handing her Suze’s note and the dirty mug, he rooted around the jumble of cupboards, then triumphantly flicked open a door that had been painted over to match the cabinets. “Da-dah!”
It was the size of a hotel minibar. Inside were three milk cartons, all open, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes with mold on top and a wedge of cheese sweating malodorously into its supermarket wrapper. Betsy squatted down to pull out the vegetable drawer, revealing two wrinkled apples and a desiccated knob of ginger. Then she tried the tiny freezing compartment, but it was sealed tight with a thick coating of ice that had oozed out like some alien lifeforce. She stood up and closed the door without a word.
“She’s single,” Lloyd said defensively.
Betsy gave him a baleful look. “So am I.” Brushing past him, she headed for the bedroom. “I’ll start unpacking.”
Lloyd let her go. He knew she would feel better when she had everything shipshape. Besides, he hated all that unfolding and fiddling around with hangers; if he stayed out of sight long enough Betsy would probably do it for him. Instead, he set himself the challenge of concocting a little supper for them both.
There was a radio on the kitchen counter. Turning it on, he heard: “This is Radio Four. And now, The Power of Pursed Lips, a short program on whistling.” Lloyd waited to see if this was a joke, but no: it was a lighthearted but apparently perfectly normal British program. Lloyd felt a glow of optimism warm his soul as he listened to the crisp accents soberly discussing virtuoso whistlers, songbird imitations and the covert uses of whistling in the Second World War. I like England, he thought.
Susannah Wilding’s cupboards were a mystery to him. How did the woman live? Saffron and cardamom pods, but no thyme; four opened bags of brown sugar in various stages of solidity, but no flour; two Italian coffee machines, but no colander—did she drain her spaghetti with a tennis racket, like Jack Lemmon in The Apartment ? One cupboard was crammed with empty wine bottles, presumably destined for recycling on some distant day of ecological atonement. Another held a brand new mixing-machine with no plug. It didn’t matter. While the late English twilight darkened slowly into night and the radio voices twittered gently, Lloyd assembled cans of tomatoes and haricot beans, unearthed a box of bay leaves, located some garlic cloves in the door of the despised refrigerator and let his creativity flow. Warmed by the gas stove, he tasted and stirred, and tasted again. Cassoulet au Rockwell. Not bad.
Suddenly Lloyd remembered the winking red light on the answering-machine. It could be an urgent message from the office, even from Harry Fox himself. Leaving the pot to simmer, he hurried into the living room, crouched on the floor beside the phone and pressed the PLAY button. A laid-back male voice filled the room.
“Sorry, sweetheart, only just got your message. If I’ve missed you, damn and blast. I rang to say I don’t think I’ll be in town after all while you’re away. But don’t worry, I’m sure the Yanks won’t trash the place. An old married couple is probably a hell of a lot tidier than you are. I love you anyway. Call us when you arrive.”
“Old married couple?” Lloyd felt a prickle of irritation. He was sure he had referred to Betsy as his partner. And why should anyone presume they were old? He wondered who the man was. He sounded too friendly for a lover: her father, perhaps. Lloyd rewound the machine, erasing the message. Whoever the man was, he was right about the tidiness. When he entered the bedroom, Lloyd felt a glow of proprietorial pride as he saw Betsy, neat as a pin after all that traveling, tucking his socks into a drawer. Now that she had turned on the lights and cleared the surfaces he realized that it was a pleasant room, small but well proportioned, with a
decorative cornice around the ceiling. An artistic hand had been at work in here too, painting the walls in wide stripes of grey and ivory, and draping a swathe of crimson material around the window to give the effect of curtains.
On the chest of drawers a diptych of photographs caught his curiosity, and he went over to examine them. One was a faded snapshot of a hippie-ish young couple with their arms around each other. The other showed a girl in a bright pink dress, eyes laughing into the camera from beneath a tumble of dark caramel hair. Lloyd held it up to show Betsy. “Do you think this is her?”
Betsy pursed her lips. “Whoever she is, she should know better than to wear pink—especially with that hair.”
“Oh.” Lloyd replaced the photograph. Women were extraordinary in the way they noticed details about each other that completely escaped him. “You’ve done a terrific job on this room,” he added, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “Don’t tell me you unpacked my stuff too?”
Betsy was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing her feet. She gave him a dry look. “Isn’t that why you brought me?”
“Of course not. And I haven’t ‘brought’ you. You wanted to come. I thought you needed background for your thesis. You said—” He fought down irritation. “I know it isn’t exactly Julian Jewel’s riverside penthouse, but hell—” He floundered, but only for a moment. “Jane Austen probably didn’t even have a toilet.”
“I know.” Betsy caught his hand. “Stop pacing.”
Lloyd stopped, still feeling ruffled, but allowing Betsy to keep his hand. She raised it to her cheek. It was warm and smooth. He sat down on the bed beside her and moved his arm around her shoulders. “You’re here so that we can be together,” he reminded them both, “so that we can share a new experience. If you never get the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, I wouldn’t care. All I want is for you to enjoy yourself.”
Betsy leaned into his shoulder and sighed. “It’s just that London seems different from when Mother and I came over after graduation.”
“No kidding. The last time you were staying in a four-star hotel in Mayfair. It’s bound to feel different living in a stranger’s apartment. But I know you.” He gave her a squeeze. “Within a week you’ll have transformed this place. You’ll have found all kinds of little stores and galleries you like. You’ll have Mr. Kipling—whoever he is—eating out of your hand, and carrying your groceries upstairs and probably inviting you to lunch while I slave in the office.”
Betsy gave him a wavering smile.
“Meanwhile,” Lloyd went on, “you are going to have a long hot bath, I am going to complete my culinary masterpiece, and we shall eat it in the living room with our bottle of duty-free Burgundy, while we feast our eyes on the lights of London. How does that sound?”
“Wonderful!” Betsy sagged against him, beginning to give a little stretch of pleasure, then stopped. “What in the world . . .?” One of her blazer buttons had snagged on something. Betsy disentangled herself, then slowly drew the object out from under the mattress. She dangled it in the air for Lloyd’s inspection, holding it between finger and thumb as if it were a dead mouse.
It was a lacy black garter belt. Lloyd started to laugh. “Well, here’s at least something we can use,” he teased, making a grab for it and putting it playfully around Betsy’s waist.
She giggled and pushed him away. “Stop being silly.”
But Lloyd, suddenly frisky, started chasing her around the room, rattling the garter clips in her ear and growling like a predator. Eventually, Betsy whipped it out of his hand and pushed him onto his back on the bed.
“You’re a cruel woman,” Lloyd said, smiling at the ceiling.
Betsy dusted herself down. “If I were the sort of woman who felt it necessary to wear black underwear, I’d buy my own—”
“Great!” Lloyd rolled over to watch her, head propped on his hand. “You can ask Mr. Kipling tomorrow where to get some.”
“—but I’m not,” Betsy added conclusively. She folded the offending item and slipped it into a drawer. She lingered there for a moment, studying the picture of the woman in the pink dress. “I just hope this Susannah Wilding is going to behave responsibly in our apartment. I’m not sure she’s a serious person.” She turned to Lloyd with a worried expression. “Did you see? She’s got the complete works of Jilly Cooper on her bookshelves.”
“Not everyone can be an intellectual.” Lloyd bounced himself gently on the bed. “She likes Fred Astaire.”
“And did you see the bathroom floor?”
“The living room’s nice.”
“If you like red.” Betsy stood for a while thoughtfully, as if compiling a silent inventory of every precious and immaculate item in their apartment. A spasm of alarm crossed her face. “I hope she’ll remember to water my plants.”
Chapter Six
“Plants,” Suze read, as the subway train hurtled downtown. “Three drops of Plantogro in a pint of water twice a week. Take care not to spill water on the table, as this damages the veneer.” Suze rolled her eyes. There were pages of this stuff. Instructions about garbage collection, the air-conditioning, uses and abuses of the basement laundry room, where to find guest soaps (what were guest soaps?). It was duller than the Economist. Suze had brought it only because her instructions for getting to work were on the back page. When her stop came she ripped the page out and left the rest of the “Household Hints” on her seat.
Outside it was hot and sunny in an exhilarating, un-English way. Down here the buildings were on a more human scale. There were children and dogs and small scruffy parks, and street-traders selling fresh fruit and bagels. The colors were pure Edward Hopper: sycamore-leaf green and the dark rust of brick houses zigzagged with fire escapes. She had only to turn her head to see the skyscrapers that marched at her heels: the Empire State Building, with its King Kong spire, and the Chrysler’s silvery pinnacle, spinning like a top in the sunshine. Suze gave a deep sigh of satisfaction, adjusted her Audrey Hepburn-style sunglasses, and headed south, checking out her reflection in the shop fronts. She was wearing a white linen crop-top, shiny black cigar trousers and her new ultra-cool sandals with an Eiffel Tower snowstorm scene embedded in each Perspex heel. She thought she looked pretty divine.
The Schneider Fox building sat on the junction of two streets, like a great white corporate elephant. Suze tightened her hold on her portfolio, pushed through the revolving glass door and entered a lobby big enough to park a jumbo jet in. The sound of her heels tip-tapping over the stone floor echoed intimidatingly. She went up and down three times in the elevator, trying to get it to stop between the lobby and the twenty-fifth floor, before a kindly woman who called her “honey” explained that Suze should try another bank of elevators. Eventually she reached the right floor, only to be blocked by a Bambi-eyed receptionist, who seemed astounded by Suze’s claim that she had come to work there. For half an hour Suze crouched on the edge of an absurdly low leather couch, pretending to be amused by cartoons in The New Yorker, while she listened to the receptionist make one phone call after another in pursuit of someone prepared to claim her. She felt like a lost dog.
Eventually the receptionist announced that Suze was to be taken to meet Quincy Taylor himself, head of design. A minion led her through an open-plan maze, marked off by bosom-high partitions behind which workers browsed at telephones and computers, like cattle in stalls. From time to time she caught tantalizing glimpses of the outside world. Inside, the air was cool and tasted of airplane. Suze’s trepidation deepened. But the art department looked reassuringly familiar, with its plan chests, its black snakes of electronic cabling and the usual clutter of glue-guns, spray paint and acetate clippings. Girlie rock music played softly. At the door of one of the glass boxes that ringed the building, Suze’s guide left her. Suze knocked and entered.
Quincy was in his late forties, dressed in black ankle boots, Armani jeans and a black collarless shirt, his artistically graying hair gathered into a neat ponytail. He was good-lookin
g—narrow-eyed, with the kind of aloof charm that could bring women to their knees, begging for approval. Suze eyed him warily. The world was full of art directors like this. She should know. She had practically lived with one for three years.
He shook hands formally and gestured to her to sit down. For a while he sat twiddling a pencil and lazily surveying her body. “So. I understand you will be joining my department for some weeks. What can you do?”
“Everything,” Suze said firmly.
“Everything?” There went the eyebrows. Here came the inward, mocking smile.
“Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator,” Suze chanted. “I can do color photocopies, I can access images on the Net. In advertising, I’ve done everything from concept to storyboards through to presentations. I’ve also worked on magazines, art-directed photoshoots, done a little mixed media, some film and TV, and I know my way around editing suites.”
“Suites? How quaint. I’m afraid that here in America we have plain old editing rooms.”
“I brought my portfolio,” Suze persisted, making a move to open it for him.
“Maybe later.” Quincy passed a hand over his face and rubbed his brow, as if he had had too little sleep, then shot her a secret, apologetic smile. Suze knew this trick too: the overworked genius who needs an adoring woman to look after him. She allowed her gaze to wander over his shoulder.
“OK.” Quincy snapped into gear. “Let me take you over to Dino. He’s working on an outdoor campaign for beer. We’re just developing some preliminary ideas to show the client. Maybe you can find him some images to play with.” He stood up and led her out into the main office and down a long aisle between banks of computers where the junior designers humbly toiled. “Basically, this is a crap beer for people who can’t afford anything better. We’re talking urban male, lower social class, tough but decent. You know, ‘Drink this beer and you too can have an honest-to-God job on an American assembly line.’ By the way,” he added, “over here we start work at nine. Be on time tomorrow.”